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6 Tips for Cleaning Up and Organizing Your PC

Find files faster and start working more efficiently with a well-ordered PC

If it’s been a while since you last organized your PC (or if you’ve never really bothered to do it), getting all of those stray files and folders in order can seem like a daunting task or a waste of time if you have never reaped the benefits. Use any downtime or holidays to reset your PC for a more productive work environment.

Even those who thrive in chaos can benefit [like the rest of us] to cleaning up a cluttered or disorganized PC. With an organized PC, you can easily find the files you need instead of hunting through folder after folder, or scanning through a long list of search items. In fact, the more creative minds need a clear workspace. What’s more, once you’ve deleted all of the files and programs you no longer need, your PC will operate more speedily and efficiently than before!

While putting your PC in order can be an all-day chore, it doesn’t have to be. These 6 steps will help you break down the cleaning and organizing process into smaller, more manageable component. This way you can do it all at once or over the course of a few days. No matter how you choose to tackle this important task, the end result will be a much more efficiently-organized (and much faster) PC!

Step 1: Tidy up the desktop

As a general rule, the state of your Windows desktop is a pretty good indicator of the overall organization of your PC. If your desktop is littered with shortcuts and files, getting rid of that clutter is a good first step to take.

Treat your Windows desktop like you would your physical one. You wouldn’t keep stacks of old files on your office desktop, so why clutter up your virtual one? Important reference tools, immediate-response items, and frequently-used files can stay out on your desktop, but old documents, files, installers, or programs should either get deleted or filed away elsewhere.

Take out the trash. Emptying the Recycle Bin—especially if you haven’t done it in a while—can free up hard drive space on your PC that could be better used for files and programs that you use and need (as opposed to those you’ve discarded). Be sure to double check it for files you may not realize you still need, but in general you likely do not need it.

Step 2: Clear out old or unnecessary files

Over time, people tend to amass all kinds of documents and files on their work computers. Some of them are important to keep around, while others don’t necessarily stand the test of time.

Determine which files are important for you to save. Important files that are worth saving or having around just in case usually include:

Tax documents and financial statements. While you do not need to keep these around forever, it is a good idea to have your recent financial records and statements at hand. These can be filed away in a separate folder, marked by year (or by month, depending on your needs). These can often be ‘archived’

Files with sentimental or personal value. There are always some files that you know you can’t afford to lose and they are typically of personal value such as photos of graduation or a personal project like the start of a novel. Make sure these are clearly labeled so that you won’t accidentally delete them. Ideally, you should also have a few copies backed up in a secure location (see Step 3below).

Determine which files are dispensable.

Check the dates. When you look through the list of the files on your computer, check the date that each document or file was last modified.If you notice that a document hasn’t been modified for over a year, you should consider whether you need to update them or discard them.

Long-finished projects. If you still have projects from a year or two ago still lurking on your hard drive, ask yourself whether or not you need to keep them around. Do you still use them for reference? Can you see yourself returning to them at a later date? If not, delete them.

“Junk or Frivolous Files”. This is in reference to the silly e-mail forwards and pictures that your friends may have sent along to you or social files. Unless they possess any sentimental value for you, it is a pretty safe bet that you can delete them.

Step 3: Back up and save important documents

If you have documents that you’d like to keep around, but don’t necessarily need to have on your everyday work or home computer, back them up or save them to an external drive or online storage source – best to do so in 2 secure locations.

Save to an external hard drive. External hard drives are usually very capacious and are particularly useful for storing entire collections—music collections, video and image galleries, and so on. If you have a large quantity of this kind of material on your hard drive, consider storing them on an external drive to free up space for new projects on your primary PC.

Use a secure online backup source. It’s always a good idea to back up your documents online—whether that means emailing important information to yourself or using an automated online backup program. This way, you can be secure knowing that your most important files won’t disappear even if your PC gets lost or crashes.

Step 4: De-clutter email inbox

Your email inbox is one of the places that can amass the greatest amount of clutter in the shortest amount of time. As a result, de-cluttering your inbox isn’t just a matter of clearing out all of the junk mail, inter-office memos, listserv posts and forwarded chain letters every couple of weeks–it’s also a matter of organizing your folders and setting up your email filters ahead of time to save you headaches later.

Delete old emails. First, go through your current inbox and purge old and unnecessary emails. Don’t forget to also delete old items from your “sent mail” folder—especially files with large attachments—since these tend to build up over time. Getting rid of these emails will free up a lot of space in both your email program and on your hard drive.

Organize folders. If you haven’t done so already, creating and using email folders to sort your mail into different categories can help you organize your emails more quickly and easily than before. Some people like to sort their email by project or category, while others prefer to sort their email in order of urgency. Either way you can often look through old file projects or very old files and decide to delete them.

Set up email filters. With most email programs, you can set up filters to make sure that emails from particular addresses or domains are immediately directed into their relevant folder–automatically organizing your inbox for you! With filters, you can make sure that all of the emails coming from your clients get sent directly into your “clients” folder, the emails from your boss get directed to your “tasks” folder, and emails from your husband or wife get sent into your “home” or “personal” folder. This is a very big time saver in e-mail sorting.

Step 5: Clean up Internet files

Cleaning up and organizing your Internet browser program can help you find and access your favorite sites more quickly and easily than before. What’s more, regularly clearing out your browser cache can help your browser run more quickly and securely than before.

Organize your bookmarks/favorites. You bookmark your favorite sites to make them easier to access from the browser window, but if there are too many bookmarks for you to scroll through before you find the right one, then it seems almost counterproductive. Besides, do you still need to have all of these sites bookmarked? Take a few moments to get rid of the bookmarks you no longer need, and organize your bookmarks into folders so that you can access them more quickly and easily than before.

Empty your internet and browser cache. It’s a good idea to clean out your browser cache every once in a while to get rid of all the junk file and clutter that may have accumulated over time. Additionally, if you work on a PC with multiple users, or are vigilant about maintaining your internet privacy, it’s a good idea to clean out the cache on a regular basis to make sure that your passwords and other saved information gets deleted.

Step 6: Get rid of unused and redundant programs

Chances are, you don’t use all of the programs that are installed on your PC. In addition to the programs that you use on a regular basis, there are a number of programs that may have come pre-installed on your computer, as well as other programs that may have sneakily “piggybacked” in on one of the programs you downloaded and installed.

Getting rid of these unused and redundant programs not only helps to free up hard drive space and keep your PC streamlined and organized, it can also prevent the freezes and crashes that occur when two programs with duplicate functions compete over the same resources.

Use the Add or Remove Programs function in the Control Panel to review a list of the programs you have installed on your PC. You may be surprised at the number of programs that you have installed on your PC that you no longer use! If you know which programs you can safely uninstall from your PC, then you can do so from this screen.

Take these simple 6 steps in one day or over the span of a slow week. You will be surprised how great you feel to rid yourself of clutter and to have revisited old projects – whether you get inspired to finish something that never was or if you feel accomplished and ready to take on the next challenge.

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